A purported declassified US govt. document from 1956 outlining personal requirements for then Indian PM Jawaharlal Nehru’s visit to America, accompanied by his daughter Indira, has gone viral.

The document which was declassified in 1973 talks about the eating, drinking and smoking habits of the PM and how his different meals – breakfast, lunch, dinner – should be prepared. Based on inputs from the Bharatiya embassy in Washington DC, it calls Nehru an ‘incessant smoker’ who may sip wine during a meal but prefers fruits juices over other alcoholic beverages.

Regarding Nehru and his daughter’s food preferences, the document says, “Inadvisable to serve beef or pork at formal luncheons or dinners due to religious prohibitions among certain classes in India. However in private luncheons or dinners the Prime Minister may well enjoy filet mignon (a type of beef dish) or something of that type”. It also adds, “Mrs. Gandhi’s preferences are the same as the Prime Minister’s. At private functions, she may eat beef & sample wines.”

As netizens have commented, this disclosure shows the hypocrisy of Nehru and his daughter who ruled the country for several decades after Independence, and for long stretches with Gau Mata as their Congress party symbol.

This cynical exploitation of the ordinary Hindu voter who considers the cow an especially sacred being, and who gave resounding victories to Congress in all elections until 1977, is blatantly obvious.

As twitter user @cogitoiam commented, “Imagine getting the majority votes of a Hindu population that worships cow as a deity & while representing those same people in the world’s biggest stage, you opt to eat beef. Could we imagine an US president going abroad and eating dog meat? He would be butchered back home & become public enemy No.1. This one incident gives a peak into how the Gandhi family viewed Indians and their sentiments, as primitive barbarians that they were here to civilize. The lives of India’s rulers for the first 5 decades had nothing in common with 99% of average Indians. They had no idea about the needs of the average Indian as they were busy living the Brown Sahib lifestyle keeping India like a protectorate of Imperial powers.”

Jawaharlal’s father Motilal Nehru was also rumored to eat beef by some groups in the 1920s. This is how a 1964 New York Times article describes the Nehrus –

“Motilal Nehru, was a shrewd and successful lawyer who lived in the manner of a wealthy English gentleman and brought up his children in Western fashion….Jawaharlal Nehru’s education, until he was 16, was entrusted to tutors. One, a part‐Irish teacher named Ferdinand T. Brooks, interested the young Nehru in theosophy…

At 16, Jawaharlal entered Harrow, one of England’s most prominent public schools…..He liked the sophisticated life of London, where he was accepted in upper social circles as a young gentleman of means with an aristocratic background….chose to call himself an agnostic….Politically, he became deeply interested in the Fabian socialism….was also significantly influenced by the writings of Karl Marx… With a generous allowance from his father, he became a connoisseur of expensive clothes, good food, wine and cigars.

…By his return to India Mr. Nehru had become so Anglicized in speech that his clipped, public‐school English was unintelligible to many of his countrymen. His command of his mother tongue, Hindi, was unsure until late in life. Mr. Nehru’s education gave him a marked ambivalence. “I have become a queer mixture of East and West, out of place everywhere, at home nowhere,” he once said.”

India’s untidyness and superstition (sic) annoyed Mr. Nehru all his life. He would fly into rage when Indians tried to touch his feet in a traditional gesture of respect. The esoteric rituals (sic) Of Hinduism repelled him, sometimes beyond endurance.”

US analyst and former CIA official Bruce Riedel has also corroborated the details provided in this declassified document about the 1956 visit, in his book ‘JFK’s Forgotten Crisis: Tibet, the CIA, and the Sino-Indian War’. Riedel writes: “It turned out that the leader of world’s largest Hindu country liked filet mignon (beef) & enjoyed Scotch as long as it was all in private. Nehru’s daughter Indira shared his food preferences.”

Incidentally, in the same book, Riedel described Nehru’s 1961 state visit to USA when John F Kennedy was the President. Kennedy called it “the worst state visit” of his presidency and also felt that Nehru seemed more interested in talking with his wife Jackie than him. Nehru was reportedly so smitten by Jackie Kennedy that he kept her photograph on his bed stand. When Jackie Kennedy visited Bharat in 1962, Nehru went to receive her at the airport and insisted that she stay with him instead of the US embassy and had the room Edwina Mountbatten had often used on her visits readied.

In many ways, Nehru was the founding father of the Lutyens’ worldview, and the likes of Karan Thapar, Shekhar Gupta, Indira Jaising, Romila Thapar, Kapil Sibal, Rahul Gandhi have carried forward his legacy to this day.

Here are some more gems of Nehru:

On Hindu temples – “Hindu temples repel me, suppress my spirit..Taj Mahal is a beautiful thing, delight to the eye and spirit”

Admiration for British colonizers – “I am the last Englishman to rule India”, Nehru reportedly told John Kenneth Galbraith, former US ambassador to Bharat. Galbraith called Nehru a very good friend who was ‘deeply devoted’ to Galbraith’s wife. The same Galbraith held the belief that ‘It Was India’s Good Fortune To Be A British Colony’.

Borderline contempt for Hindu deities – Nehru once told writer and philosophy professor Raja Rao, “Enough of Rama, Krishna – 3,000 yrs of deities got us slavery, poverty”. Essentially, Nehru like most left-liberals of today blamed Hindu Dharma for all of Bharat’s ills and airbrushed the record of the Islamic and Christian colonizers who looted and ravaged. He also diminishes the heroic struggle by Hindus and all Dharmics to resist these invaders, which helped us survive till date.

Elitist arrogance & contempt for Sadhus – At a public meeting, Nehru slapped and abused the organizers in chaste Urdu as ‘low-bred’. At another meeting, he slapped with both hands and kicked with both feet at Congress volunteers who tried to come near him to touch his feet in the traditional Bharatiya way of paying respect to one’s elders! Post independence, a group of sadhus was sitting peacefully on indefinite fast outside the PM’s residence to demand that cow slaughter be banned. Nehru and his sister Vijayalakshmi Pandit came out of the house in a rage and slapped a sadhu who approached them with folded hands.

It is no wonder that Nehru was termed ‘English by education, Muslim by culture and Hindu by an accident of birth’ by other political leaders of his era. He has also been rightly described as both an “incurable bully” and “an incurable coward”. ‘Chacha’ Nehru’s alleged womanizing is a lesser discussed aspect of his personality, with many episodes like this, this. There is also some speculation that he was bisexual and that an STD like Syphilis might have had something to do with his death.

At the end, we will leave readers with these words of Shri Sita Ram Goel from his book ‘How I became a Hindu’:

“Today, I view Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru as a bloated Brown Sahib, and Nehruism as the combined embodiment of all the imperialist ideologies — Islam, Christianity, White Man’s Burden, and Communism — that have flooded this country in the wake of foreign invasions. And I do not have the least doubt in my mind that if India is to live, Nehruism must die…. 

The power and prestige which Pandit Nehru acquired within a few years after the death of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel had nothing to do with his own merits, either as a person, or as a political leader, or as a thinker. They were the outcome of a long historical process which had brought to the fore a whole class of self-alienated Hindus. Pandit Nehru would have never come to the top if this class had not been there…

It is not an accident that the Nehruvian regime has behaved like the British Raj in most respects. The Nehruvians have looked at India not as a Hindu country but as a multi-racial, multi-religious and multi-cultural cockpit. They have tried their best, like the British, to suppress the mainstream society and culture with the help of “minorities”, that is, the colonies crystallised by imperialism. They have also tried to fragment Hindu society, and create more “minorities” in the process. In fact, it has been their whole-time occupation to eliminate every expression of Hindu culture, to subvert every symbol of Hindu pride, and persecute every Hindu organisation, in the name of protecting the “minorities”, Hindus have been presented as monsters who will commit cultural genocide if allowed to come to power.”

It is the tragedy of this once great civilization that the progeny of the Nehru-Gandhi family still continue to occupy a prominent place in the nation’s polity, and a significant chunk of Hindu voters still support this dynasty despite their ever-increasing anti-Hindu actions.